There is no figure in film history quite like Roberto Rossellini (1906-77), the Italian director who never stopped questioning the relationship between moving images and the world. As a result of his restless curiosity and capacity for change, he created masterworks in at least four different styles, reinventing himself — and to a significant degree, the movies themselves — each time.

Rossellini remains best known for “Open City” (1945), a story of anti-Nazi resistance set in the last days of the war in Europe and partly filmed in the streets of Rome. Rossellini was one of a diverse group of filmmakers, including Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, who became known as neorealists for their determination to get out of the studio and rediscover a sense of gritty, working-class authenticity.

But by the early 1950s, Rossellini had turned his back on neorealism in favor of a detached, philosophical approach (“Voyage to Italy,” 1954) that made him, along with Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, a founding figure of the modernist European cinema of angst and alienation. Later in the decade he shifted again, offering with “India: Matri Bhumi” (1959) one of the first documentaries in the objective, intensely observational style that would become known as cinéma vérité.

The fourth and final stage of Rossellini’s career remains the least familiar, but in many ways it may be the most fascinating. In 1963, after a string of unsatisfying commercial features, he announced he was leaving the movies behind to concentrate on a grand project for television: a series of historical films meant to educate the mass audience, offering essential information and material for argument. Dedicated less to telling stories than to disseminating ideas, these films would abandon the illusionism and emotional involvement of traditional moviemaking in favor of simple, direct communication.

Made for state networks in France and Italy, they have come to be known collectively as Rossellini’s history films, and the Criterion Collection has drawn on them for two new releases: a full-featured edition of “The Taking of Power by Louis XIV,” a 1966 French television production that became an unexpected theatrical success, and “Rossellini’s History Films: Renaissance and Enlightenment,” a four-disc set on Criterion’s no-frills Eclipse label that contains “Blaise Pascal” (1972), “Cartesius” (1974) and the three-part “Age of the Medici” (1973).

The radicalism of Rossellini’s approach is immediately evident in “Louis XIV,” which begins with a group of peasants and tradesmen on a bank of the Seine discussing the great events taking place in the palace across the river. Cardinal Mazarin is dying, and the untested young king (Jean-Marie Patte, a pudgy little man who looks like a particularly debauched member of a 1970s heavy metal band) is about to assume the authority that has been held in reserve for him.

The dialogue is bluntly didactic, with characters telling one another things they would already know entirely for the benefit of the audience. The Louvre, looming in the background, is not an elaborately constructed set but an effect created by painting on glass — one of the earliest and simplest special-effects techniques.

Nothing could be further from the tasteful melodramatics and carefully staged spectacle of Fred Zinnemann’s “Man for All Seasons” (1966), an Oscar-winning exemplar of historical filmmaking. Rossellini is not striving to create an illusion of well-rounded, lifelike characters or immersive historical detail, but to offer an analysis and an argument.

In this case, it’s an argument drawn from the work of the historians Philippe Erlanger and Jean-Dominique de la Rochefoucauld, both consultants on the project: that Louis was able to tame a rebellious aristocracy partly by imposing on them fashions in food, clothing and architecture that were expensive enough to keep them in permanent debt.

Rossellini isn’t asking his viewers to identify with his characters or become caught up in their personal dramas, as Zinnemann does. Instead he creates a detached perspective by dropping the whole system of close-ups and cross-cutting that classical cinema uses to envelop the spectator emotionally. Most scenes are shot in one or two long takes, using camera movements and zooms to close in on details or investigate relationships.

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Reportedly, it was Rossellini himself who operated the zooms, using a remote control device of his own invention that allowed him to move in and out of a scene at will. In these films he uses the camera as a kind of scientific instrument — sometimes a microscope, sometimes a telescope — probing the world for information.

Which is not to say that the films are dry and clinical. For all of his scientific ambitions, Rossellini remains an artist who can’t help giving his work emotional shading, from the sense of exhaustion and claustrophobia that pervades “Blaise Pascal” (with its slowly expiring protagonist, played by a young Pierre Arditi) to the utopian yearning of “The Age of the Medicis.”

“Medicis,” in three episodes of approximately 90 minutes each, begins as a movie about the shrewd worldliness of the banker Cosimo de’ Medici (the dolorous, long-faced Marcello Di Falco) and ends as a tribute to the scholarly humanism of the author and architect Leon Battista Alberti (Virgilio Gazzolo, spherical and fast-talking). “Medicis” leaves us with an impression of Quattrocento Florence as a city of sublime harmony in which art and commerce are in perfect balance, seamlessly interdependent.

In his critical biography of Rossellini, Tag Gallagher quotes him speaking to an audience of New York University students in 1973: “One makes films in order to become a better human being.” Just watching Rossellini’s magnificent work may help a bit in that department as well. (“The Taking of Power by Louis XIV,” $29.95, not rated; “Rossellini’s History Films,” $59.95, not rated.)

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